Moonlight Pulse (83 reviews)

Metroidvania with character-switching

This 2D platformer metroidvania has memorable characters and very cool worldbuilding. You switch between characters to match their abilities to the right situations. They live on a living, planet-sized creature and are fighting off the parasites that are slowly killing their creature-planet. You'll swim through its blood vessels and explore its organs.

It's not super long—I finished the story in 9 hours. It's just about the right length to satisfy.

Celeste $1.99 (90% off, new all-time low)

Hard but fair precision platformer by an expert of platformer design. Excellent controls, deep platforming mechanics, and a cathartic story about internal and external struggles.

Taiji (906 reviews)

Nonlinear discovery-based puzzles

If you liked the puzzle design of The Witness, you'll enjoy Taiji as more of that but with scenic pixel art.

Instead of a linear sequence of tutorials and puzzles, Taiji is open-ended. You can wander wherever you want, solve the puzzles you stumble upon, and ultimately discover this place's secrets. Sometimes you find a puzzle that you don't understand, so you'll just have to leave it for later, when you've learned more puzzle mechanics. It's like a metroidvania but gated by knowledge instead of abilities.

All the puzzles are built on grids of tiles that you can turn on or off. There are no tutorials; you have to figure out the puzzle mechanics on your own, hinted by environmental details.

Inscryption $7.99 (60% off, new all-time low)

You find an old, abandoned video game and load it up. It's an atmospheric, spooky card game, hiding layers of secrets for you to discover. The less you know before starting the game, the better your experience will be.

Tunic $14.99 (50% off, new all-time low)

A little guy in a green tunic picks up a sword and goes on an adventure, but the game is in an unknown language and you only have a few pages of the manual. It's like a metroidvania but your progress is based on knowledge.

This could have been Beta 1.8 and no one would have been able to tell.

Ultimate Chicken Horse $5.24 (65% off, matching the all-time low)

Design platformer levels with your friends, then race them to the end, locally or online. Points are only awarded if someone died, so make the level extra dangerous!

Games I know of on Android:

• Ganz Schön Clever — Digital adaptation of a board game. It's like bingo except you roll dice and there's actual skill involved.
• Knotwords — Crosswords but instead of word clues, each region of the board indicates what letters appear there.
• Threes — 2048 was a ripoff of 1024, and 1024 was a ripoff of Threes. Threes is the OG.
• Sagrada — Digital adaptation of a board game. Build a stained glass window by rolling dice and placing them on your board in the right pattern.
• Simon Tatham's Puzzles — Big compilation of various puzzle types.
• Handshakes (by Pet Pumpkin) — "Solo co-op" sokoban puzzle where you try to get two guys to shake hands.
• inbento — Assemble lunch boxes by sliding tiles around to match the reference picture.

Newgrounds is dead serious about preserving its content, even with the death of Flash. Ruffle, the Flash emulator, was created by a former employee and Newgrounds is a major sponsor of the project. The most important movies have been converted to video as well.

When Newgrounds adopted high-resolution thumbnails about a decade and a half ago, there was a big volunteer campaign to recreate thumbnails for the entire back catalogue of the portal.

Thanks to Ruffle, people can and are still submitting Flash content to the portal, in addition to web-friendly content!

Toodee and Topdee (559 reviews)

Puzzle platformer/block pushing hybrid

The 2d platforming world and top-down world have smashed together. You control one hero from each dimension, who share the same space in the levels. You switch between platformer and top-down modes and must get both characters to the goal. The boss levels are hard but very cool, combining action and puzzles.

Also features local 2-player co-op and a generous assist mode.

Steam input is absolutely baller. I use it extensively with my Steam Controller. For FPS games, I have gyro aim activate while the right pad is touched.

bunboat

Hypnospace Outlaw $4.79 (a bizarre 76% off, new all-time low)

Explore a remarkably authentic simulation of the 1999 World Wide Web as a moderator of a Geocities-like website hub. Rather than just being a joke about the corny retro graphics, it's a heartfelt funeral for that era of the internet.

Gato Roboto $1.99 (75% off, matching the all-time low)

Polished metroidvania with great monochrome pixel art. You are a cat piloting a robot suit. It only lasts a few hours, but they're hours well spent.

• Assault Android Cactus
  • Slick arcade-style twin-stick shooter with a pumpin’ soundtrack. Lots of characters with unique playstyles. Local co-op.
• Crypt of the NecroDancer
  • Bring rhythm to the classic roguelike. There's local and online co-op and lots of mods.
• Just Shapes and Beats
  • Rhythm bullet hell with a large EDM soundtrack. Local and online co-op.
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
  • This is a stretch of the "couch" part of couch co-op. One player must defuse a bomb. The other players have a bomb defusal manual and must help the first player without being able to see the screen.
• Moving Out 2
  • Work together to drag and throw furniture into a truck. Chaotic co-op with physics, local and online.
• Gauntlet: Slayer Edition
  • 2014 revival of an 80s arcade classic. Co-op dungeon crawling action. Warrior needs food. Badly! Local and online co-op.
• Pizza Possum
  • Very soft stealth game about stealing and eating lots of food. Local co-op.

Some offline-friendly FPS games.

• Half-Life 1 and 2
• Borderlands 2 and 3
• Dusk
• SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell

First-person puzzle games (other than Portal 1 and 2, which you've heard about enough already):

• Once you're done both Portals, check out community-made mod campaigns!
  • Portal: Revolution is a prequel to Portal 2 that introduces a few new mechanics.
  • Portal Stories: Mel has pretty much zero new mechanics but cranks up the difficulty.
• Viewfinder
• The Witness

Do I get to throw a ball at the TV?

Put out Witness 2 and I'm all over it.

If you liked the puzzle design style of the Witness, check out Taiji. It uses a similar open-ended structure that leaves puzzle rules for you to discover on your own.

The 2015 Monster Summer Sale was particularly memorable for me thanks to the music. I downloaded it and still listen to it! Ultimately, though, I'm glad Steam doesn't have tie-in minigames and flash deals anymore, since it was tedious to have to metagame them for the best value.

Path of Exile's global channels have had a glorious history of unhinged nonsense. A dev was even around to witness this one!

The repo has source code and a brief writeup, including run instructions. It's an x86 port from Atari Basic. Actually, since this video, a contributor cut it down to 483 bytes!

Overcooked! 2 $6.24 (75% off, matching the all-time low)

Chaotic co-op cooking, local or online. Complete restaurant orders quickly in increasingly absurd scenarios. Cook in a haunted kitchen, above a mineshaft, in the middle of the highway, or on a burning hot air balloon that crashes into another restaurant! This is the kind of game that people joke will ruin friendships.

Director of the game, Jonathan Rogers (who isn't in this video), has outright cited Elden Ring as inspiration for the design of combat for Path of Exile 2, and this video reiterates that.

For devoted exiles, this promo doesn't reveal anything new, but it is happening in front of a larger audience. I'm looking forward to more class reveals.

Depends on your definition of "new" and "must-have".

• Grapple Dog 75% off — momentum-based grappling hook platformer with a very funky soundtrack and Nitrome-style 2D art (spoiler: the dev was a Nitrome artist)
• Cobalt Core 25% off — deckbuilding in space! There's an actual plot with an interesting cast of characters. The board game-style positioning mechanic was what sold me on the game.
• Cassette Beasts 40% off — creature collector with an identity that isn't just "indie Pokémon". Cool worldbuilding, heartfelt story, grown-up mechanics, and imaginative monster designs that avoid the "animal + element" formula.

So true

Neon White

(Neon White good)

Also check out the deals thread on !games@lemmy.world

Super Hexagon

Assault Android Cactus $4.99 (75% off, matching the all-time low)

Slick arcade-style twin-stick shooter with a pumpin' soundtrack. Clear out arenas full of robots, build up combos, and go for a high score. A large roster of characters offer a wide variety of playstyles. There's also 4-player local co-op.

Good catch with the gravel texture! I didn't notice it in the back. On the topic of textures, I know there was a complete but very subtle texture overhaul sometime after 1.0, but I can't tell if this is before or after that change unless I reference the changed textures side by side.

Nowadays? If you want to get a game in my face, it has to be via word of mouth or be blown in by the winds of Steam.

I took a look through my game library and these are the broad categories of how a game ended up there.

• Friends (though I tend to be the recommender for my friends)
  • Path of Exile, Cobalt Core
• I liked the demo at Steam Next Fest
  • Moonlight Pulse, Laika: Aged Through Blood, Cassette Beasts
• Announcement through a game I already like
  • Jackbox series, Slayers X, Vertigo 2
• YouTube channels
  • Game Maker's Toolkit: Neon White, Toodee and Topdee, Assault Android Cactus
  • From other channels, but I don't remember which: Gunfire Reborn, A Short Hike, Bug Fables
• Sheer luck
  • I found Corn Kidz 64 from a tile at the bottom of a Steam store page, before it was released
  • I found Hypnospace Outlaw from Steam's discovery queue…
  • …and following through the music credits got me to Queenjazz's Bandcamp site, where I found an OST for a different game, Grapple Dog!

Big if true.

Joke's on you. Slay the Spire is having a sequel!

I don't see Corn Kidz 64 on that list.

I'll back up June. I was "that's pretty nice" on Undertale but wasn't nearly as positive on it as its fandom was. I loved Inscryption. It's not meta like Undertale, but it does have occasional fourth wall breaks, which is part of its game-within-a-game fiction.

I loved this guy's previous game, Hyperbolica.

Geck!

Hyperbolic bonus: Hyperbolica, a first-person walking simulator set in a universe with hyperbolic geometry. You do odd jobs and play games that explore the strangeness of this geometry. Also, there's a slight digression to explore spherical geometry as well.

I don't know how much you've been following the game, but we do know the combat is slower and more intentional in 2, with monsters telegraphing their attacks and a greater need to combo multiple skills together. Skills are designed to be more narrow and situational, given you can have more than two six-links now.

Gameplay we've seen shows white mobs being seriously dangerous and flasks no longer recharge when killing them. Streamers who have been invited to the preview events in GGG's marketing tour have stated the game feels harder.

Jonathan says he still wants to let people make crazy and powerful builds, but these changes suggest they're killing off the one-button facerolling PoE 1 is known for.

Currency market. We're saved! The divine orbs will come in quick and so will the inflation!